EMC on Tuesday rolled out an open source community edition of its Greenplum data warehousing software. The free version is aimed at bringing more developers into the data warehousing fold.

Scott Yara, vice president of EMC's data computing products division, said the community edition of the Greenplum database could turn "10s of thousands of downloads" into "100,000s of thousands". "There's an opportunity here to grow the analytics community," said Yara.

The game plan for EMC is pretty obvious: Put Greenplum software in as many hands as possible. If Greenplum can build a vibrant data warehousing app ecosystem it could become a standard platform. Yara added that Greenplum has historically focused on high-end data warehousing, but the community of developers needs to be larger and should reach out to data scientists and other IT pros.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CN...
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